Overview
- The drone strikes that hit multiple Yandex data centers last week destroyed or badly damaged at least three facilities and caused widespread outages across Yandex products and services.
- Those outages left millions unable to use search, the Alisa voice assistant, Yandex Cloud, Yandex Pay and the Yandex Go taxi network, and disrupted third‑party businesses that run on Yandex infrastructure.
- Restoration is uncertain because the damaged supercomputers contained thousands of high‑end Nvidia chips that cannot be legally imported into Russia, which blocks quick replacement of compute capacity.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the outages reduced Kremlin‑linked bot activity but independent analysts and anti‑disinformation projects warn the claim is not clearly supported by available metrics.
- The attacks have intensified scrutiny of Yandex’s global footprint and data flows, highlighted a €100 million Dutch fine against Ridetech/Yango for risky transfers to Russia, and raised fears that user data from services abroad could be accessible to Russian security services.